The one where Ross plays football...

For those of you new to Football Manager you may benefit from reading about my first Football Manager experiment. I'll wait...

Now that you are familiar with the game, let me tell you about my latest experiment.

Inspiration

I recently came across an interesting article about how three of Ross County's goalkeepers are called Ross and thought to myself, wouldn't it be funny if the whole team was named Ross. Why think when you can do was my next thought, so I fired up Football Manager 20 and went about creating "Team Ross".

Upon launching Football Manager 20 and taking charge of Ross County I came across my first issue. Turns out the board of Ross County have a problem with approving my offer of £75 million for Ross Barkley. Oh well, no problem. Just need to amend the database that powers Football Manager. Thankfully this is fairly easy to do with the Football Manager Editor tool. So easy in fact that it gave me another idea. Why stop at a team full of players named Ross?

Why not create a whole league?

Team Names

I needed a list of popular names and having worked for the National Records of Scotland (NRS) in a previous life I knew exactly where to get this information from. NRS have a nice archive of baby names going back to 1974 and you can download the whole lot as a CSV file. I went with popular names for boys from 1990-1999 as that would give me popular names of current footballers in the 20-30 age bracket, not very scientific I know, but it will do for my experiment. This gave me the following list in descending order:

• Ryan
• Andrew
• David
• Scott
• James
• Ross
• Michael
• Daniel
• Christopher
• Craig
• Jordan
• Jamie

That's twelve names in total which is enough for a league in Scotland.

Creating the clubs

The next steps were a bit trial and error, and this is what I came up with:

• I would create twelve clubs (and stadiums) and place them all into Scottish League Two (the lowest playable Scottish League in Football Manager 20). In fact I could only move ten teams into League Two, so I just went with the top ten names. Didn't want to leave Jordan and Jamie out, so I placed Jordan into the Highland League and Jamie into the Lowland League.
• I placed 60 players (6 goalkeepers, 20 defenders, 20 midfielders and 14 strikers) into each team, going with the top players in terms of current ability. Decided to be strict with player names as well, so no Andys in team Andrew, no Daves in team David and so on...
• To avoid clubs going into administration I gave the clubs a starting bank balance of £100 million and a pretty high reputation (to attract decent managers).
• To keep the money flowing in I gave each club a 50,000 capacity stadium and allocated 30,000 season ticket holders to each club.
• To stop new players coming in I put a transfer embargo (until 1st June 2025) on each club and extended all players contracts to expire in 2025.

Here are the teams I ended up with (the game allocated the managers and designated the captains and vice captains).

Ryan Raptors

Based: Glasgow

Manager: Mark Hughes

Captain: Ryan Donk

Vice Captain: Ryan Jack

Top players based on current ability (CA):

Best eleven (4-2-3-1):

Andrew Athletics

Based: Glasgow

Manager: Sam Allardyce

Captain: Andrew Surman

Vice Captain: Andrew Robertson

Top players based on current ability (CA):

Best eleven (4-2-3-1):

David Dynamos

Based: Edinburgh

Manager: Luciano Spalletti

Captain: David Alaba

Vice Captain: David Braz

Top players based on current ability (CA):

Best eleven (4-2-3-1):

Scott Sabres

Based: Edinburgh

Manager: Stephen Robinson

Captain: Scott Brown

Vice Captain: Scott Dann

Top players based on current ability (CA):

Best eleven (4-2-1-2-1):

James Jaguars

Based: Aberdeen

Manager: Kurban Bedyev

Captain: James Milner

Vice Captain: James Tomkins

Top players based on current ability (CA):

Best eleven (4-2-3-1):

Ross Rovers

Based: Aberdeen

Manager: Steve McClaren

Captain: Ross Barkley

Vice Captain: Ross Draper

Top players based on current ability (CA):

Best eleven (4-4-1-1):

Michael Mavericks

Based: Dundee

Manager: Dick Campbell

Captain: Michael Bradley

Vice Captain: Michael Liendl

Top players based on current ability (CA):

Best eleven (4-4-2):

Daniel Devils

Based: Dundee

Manager: Walter Mazzarri

Captain: Daniel Carrico

Vice Captain: Daniel Alves

Top players based on current ability (CA):

Best eleven (4-2-3-1):

Christopher Chiefs

Based: Stirling

Manager: Roberto Di Matteo

Captain: Christopher Jullien

Vice Captain: Christopher Schindler

Top players based on current ability (CA):

Best eleven (4-2-3-1):

Craig Claymores

Based: Stirling

Manager: Javi Gracia

Captain: Craig Gordon

Vice Captain: Craig Dawson

Top players based on current ability (CA):

Best eleven (4-2-2-2):

Jordan Jays

Based: Falkirk

Manager: N/A

Captain: Jordan Henderson

Vice Captain: Jordan Pickford

Top players based on current ability (CA):

Best eleven (No records available)

Jamie Jazz

Based: Falkirk

Manager: N/A

Captain: Jamie Bosio

Vice Captain: Jamie Vardy

Top players based on current ability (CA):

Best eleven (No records available)

End of season

And here are the final standings at the end of season 2019/20 -

David Dynamos won it fairly easily in the end and Daniel Devils picked up the other promotion place by beating James Jaguars in the playoffs. Don't think James Jaguars were too disappointed though as they managed to qualify for Europe by winning the Scottish Cup!!!

None of the "new teams" were represented in the League Cup (bug possibly?). But they were represented in the brilliantly named Tunnock's Caramel Wafer Challenge Cup -

Ryan Raptors winning that one with a sweet victory over Daniel Devils.

At the opposite end of the table Ross Rovers played Jamie Jazz in the relegation playoff -

Jamie Jazz winning it 4-2 on aggregate.

Coming up next...

In the next part of this article we will look at how David Dynamos and Daniel Devils get on in League 1 as well as how James Jaguars get on in Europe. Might also take a deeper look at the finances of each club to see how they are coping. Given that each of them started with £100 million in the bank I'm going to guess that they managed fine!